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Teresa de Lauretis – Retrospectatorship: Reading Films with Psychoanalysis

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Seminar
September 15, 2014
Time: Monday September 15th to Thursday September 18th

Feminist Media Studio
CJ Building, Room 2.130
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke W
Montreal (Qc)

The notion of spectatorship, introduced by feminist film critics in the 1970s and developed throughout the 1990s, transformed the theory of the cinematic apparatus into a theory of cinema as a social technology. By taking into account the spectator’s subjective response to a film based on identification, fantasy, and memory, cinema has been understood as playing a role in the production of subjectivity. The seminar is devoted to how a film is “read” (seen, heard, understood, subjectively received, and/or remembered) in the mode Patricia White has called “retrospectatorship,” a viewing shaped by the experiences, fantasies, and memories it elicits in the spectator. Relevant psychoanalytic concepts will be discussed and, whenever possible, illustrated with reference to films.

The seminar will meet daily from Monday September 15th to Thursday September 18th, and be followed by a free and open public lecture on Friday September 19th at 5:00, entitled “Val Lewton’s Cat People: Otherness in the Everyday”.

 

Films to be discussed

  1. The Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935)
  2. Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur, prod. Val Lewton, 1942)
  3. I Walked with a Zombie (dir. Jacques Tourneur, prod. Val Lewton, 1943)
  4. M. Butterfly or eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg, 1993, 1999)

 

Critical texts to be discussed

  1. T. de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008)
  2. Patricia White, “Retrospectatorship”
  3. Jean Laplanche & Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality”
  4. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”
  5. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

Seminar Participants

  1. Momoko Allard, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University
  2. Patricia Ciccone, Master’s Student, Film Studies, Concordia University
  3. Desirée de Jesus, Doctoral Student, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
  4. Ayanna Dozier, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University
  5. Katherine Kline, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University
  6. Andrée Lafontaine, Doctoral Student, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
  7. Sasha Langford, Master’s Student, Media Studies, Concordia University
  8. Alison Reiko Loader, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University
  9. Fulvia Massimi, Doctoral Student, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
  10. Tess McClernon, Doctoral Student, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
  11. Dayna McLeod, Doctoral Student, Humanities, Concordia University
  12. Vanessa Meyer, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University
  13. Meredith Slifkin, Doctoral Student, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
  14. Katerina Symes, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University
  15. Pascale Thériault, Master’s Student, Etudes cinématographiques, Université de Montréal
  16. Celia Vara, Doctoral Student, Communication Studies, Concordia University